At an Inn

Though a love poem, Hardy’s initial focus on the serving staff at the inn is a critical element. Hardy uses the presence of the staff to symbolize the gap between the ideal and the real. At the emotional center of Hardy’s poem is the difference between what the serving staff at the inn perceives about the speaker and the companion and the reality of that relationship. The serving staff is especially attentive to the couple because they see “living love” (Line 10); they see “Love’s own pair” (Line 18); they feel the pair’s “love-light” (19). They are certain that the twosome meeting at the inn for a cozy rendezvous are most surely in love.

Their own lives uncomplicated by such emotions, the staff glorifies the couple’s dynamic. They see—or perhaps more accurately want to see—the couple as an embodiment of ideal love, the fantasy of pure and powerful love. The point of Hardy’s focus on the staff is that they have no idea who these two people are, these “strangers” (Line 1). The reality, as the closing two stanzas reveal, is quite different.

The poem uses the frame of the serving staff to symbolize how easily people conjure love from a desperate faith that such powerful “Love” (Line 18) with a capital L (as Hardy uses it) actually exists.